Slashdot Mirror
IBM Working on Brain-Rivaling Computer
Obdurate writes "The first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power
of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a $184M contract
announced by the US Government yesterday.
ASCI Purple and Blue Gene/L will be the fastest and most powerful machines built,
with a combined capacity equal to the 500 best of todays computers."
nooooooo keep the Terminators away from me!
how do they measure the processing power of the human brain?
How often does it think about sex?
Can this thing telecommute? It could hold several jobs since most people only use a fraction of their brain at work. I wonder if it can do its own taxes.
In fact he's a bit thick.
Now we can have computers that screw things up at a rate that rivals our own! Because seriously, we needed the competition.
Big deal. My P133 with Word 97 exceeds the entire slashdot crew at spell checking.
"THE first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a £184 million contract announced by the US Government yesterday."
That's 184 Million POUNDS, not dollars. Multiply by about 1.5 or so... this thing's gonna cost 1/4 billion US $$$... crazy...
Are we talking about the brain as we use it, or the brain, at it's full potential?
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Actually, that won't be that difficult to do if they are comparing this computer with the "brain power" some of the doe-doe's I went to high school with
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
I once had an exercise in a business math class where half had calculators and the other had nothing. Calculator users *had* to use the calculator. The teacher then asked simple arithmetic questions - 2x2, 3 minus 1, etc. Of course, the people without calculators could answer first.
The fastest computer in the world will always be limited to how quickly data may be fed to it. One way or another, a human will have to direct this operation - if only for safety and security considerations.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
We will have such chips implanted into our brains in order to reason even quicker, then we will develop newer chip that will help design newer computers that will miniaturize themselves as new implants that will help us... :)
etc.
How far are we from learning kung fu from an optical disk ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
imagine a beawolf cluster of theese things, oh hang on, its already a cluster....er in that case, can you port it to linux or play play half life on it????? bet it cant do solitare
dybia felly dwi a hampster (i think therefore i am a hampster)
UltraVision
soon we'll be suffering from brain-out-of-date syndrome....
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
Now whose brain are we using as a benchmark? Anna Nicole Smith or Marilyn Vos Savant?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
What human brain are they talking about, and what did they use to measure the processing power?
Obligatory slashdot remarks:
But man, just think... Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?????
1) measure processing power of human brain
2) Build $184M super computer
3) ???
4) PROFIT!
Sure the hardware may be impressive, but from what I've seen IBM software really sucks. I wonder who's writing the programs that will be running on this beast.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Gimme 100 each of the Power5 Based Nintendo game systems and iMacs, please.............
Is it just me or doesn't the governement already have enough ultra-mega computers built for them? I mean, what do they do with the old 1.4 terrabit systems? Use them as Unreal 2003 servers?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
there's variability in human brains. I wonder whose brain it will rival. We don't need to spend $100,000,000,000 to wind up with an electronic version of Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh.
Isn't the power of the human brain a standard unit, like horsepower? The power of the human brain (as measured by NIST, they have a reference brain in storage) == 1 Brainpower.
6.02x10^23, baby!
Perhaps now we will get the Answer to Life, Universe, Everything!
And it damn better not be 42!
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
IBM starts work on computer to rival the human brain
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent
THE first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a £184 million contract announced by the US Government yesterday.
ASCI Purple and Blue Gene/L will be the fastest and most powerful machines built, with a combined capacity equal to the 500 best of today's computers.
ASCI Purple, which will be built first and used to simulate nuclear tests, will be able to complete 100 thousand billion calculations per second -- a speed known as 100 teraflops that some scientists say is comparable to the human brain.
Blue Gene/L, which has a broader range of functions and will be used by US Department of Energy's three main laboratories, will be more powerful still, with a maximum speed of 360 teraflops.
The computers, which will be built by 2004, will lack the consciousness, intellect and capacity for thought of a brain, but will be equivalent in calculating speed and power. They have memories of at least two petabytes -- equal to a billion books. Mike Nelson, IBM's director of internet technology and strategy, said: "It is hard to quantify the power of a brain, but when you look at the raw processing power of these machines, you're looking at figures in the same ballpark."
The computers will not have artificial intelligence, and scientists remain many years away from building one that matches even the abilities of a simple mouse brain.
ASCI Purple will be built using 12,544 IBM Power5 microprocessors, the same chips that are used in Apple PCs and Nintendo games systems. It will have autonomic software, allowing it to monitor itself for hardware breakdowns or lack of capacity. Blue Gene/L will be able to map stars in three dimensions, analyse earthquakes, and help in oil exploration.
I'm glad they didn't call it SkyNet!
The human brain does more than simple processing. Think about it, the ability to do calculations, etc., is tied into the most ancient (reptilian) part of the brain.
Now, if they could make a computer that could experience emotions (or could explain what women really want :-)), that would be a true accomplishment.
ever let Will Smith... get jiggy wit it?
Wasn't it supposed to be built by Cyberdyne systems with it becoming self aware on 29 Aug 97 and destroying the world shortly thereafter
End of Line.
Although, it must be said, considering that there are some out there who consider Porky's to be the *best movie ever* I'm not sure it's such a great achievement...
Thou Shalt Not Make a Machine in the image of the mind of Man.
Somehow, I think that might be good advice.
The processing power of a honeybee's brain in terms of the power needed for it to perform flight as it does, and find honey, and return to the hive, etc., has been estimated at 60 teraflops. The idea that 6 times as much processing power = the human brain seems reasonably foolish. I think ultimately, the problem is that people tend to think of brains as giant calculating machines, when they're not -- there's a great deal of hardwired logic controlling things like breathing and reflexes, that aren't so much mediated by calculation, as they are by simple input output "black-box" sort of processes. This is another reason attempting to equate a brain to a giant computer seems foolish.
Kargis Strong, MD
is this computer supposed to be smarter than?
Albert Einstein or mental midget moron George W. Bush?
Whose great idea was it I wonder?
grisha.org
I think I read somewhere that brain fires bursts of neurotransmitters in the range of 40 Hz. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, you're conciousness is running on a processor that's slower than the chip in your GBA or your Palm Pilot.
I think that what most people don't get is that the brain is not that powerful a computer... It's just very, very good at what it's supposed to do.
Think of it this way. Instead of a computer and mobo combination, consider the brain as dozens and dozens of embedded micro-controllers that talk to eachother via a protocol. Each one is very specific. We have one that handles getting audio signals, one that handles getting video signals... and then completely different controllers for recognizing voice, music, speech, text, and images. There is one overlying controller-- the frontal lobe-- but most of what is does is pattern matching and random number generation. It's the combination or all these working together, not the raw ability of the brain to process information, that makes the magic of 'conciousness'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
So they want to have the best FX for Duke Nukem forever? Must be splended playing that. Ser. I wonder how long it will take before a computer wil have A.I that runs on such a computer. Accourden scientist it wil be in 20 years to 30 and we will become the pets of these computers. Hmmm
The brain they used as baseline was Jennifer Love Hewitts. Bah!
Will it cuss whenever it gets a core dump? Will it cry when its favorite sysadmin leaves for a new job? Will it get horny when a cute little beowulf cluster comes sashaying by? Will it eventually get totally stupid and become a manager?
My place in the universe is still very much assured it would seem.
And does it crash when exposed to porn?
The same thing we do every night Pinky. Try and take over the WORLD! (cue theme song)
What this means is that the hardware has gotten to a point where it can do tons of new stuff. It's the software that's lacking behind. With this much processing power, human like voice and image recognition, and at least the thought process of an insect should be theoretically possible, if only we had the s/w to do it.
The ball's on our court now.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I heard ( A sciam article I think ) that all the computers in existance put together equal approximately the processing power of a mouse brain.
Eat at Joe's.
Part Deux.
*Reserves a seat for the end of the world*
"The computers, which will be built by 2004, will lack the consciousness, intellect and capacity for thought"
The only brain this computer may rival is that of a coma patient.
It's not anything remotely like a human brain. They're making some rough analogy between storage size, processing speed, and the number and nature of neurons in the human skull. This is just a really really really fast/big version of existing machines.
Again, for those who haven't read Douglas Hofstadter's excellent books GEB and MMT - being human-like is a *really* tough thing for a computer, and we haven't even begun to figure out the basics of it on paper. Maybe in 100 years we'll understand the problem better, but I'll place my bets now that when we do we'll finally realize it's futile to try to mimic it.
11*43+456^2
2004 Blue Gene achieves processing power of human brain.
2006, 2 a.m. Blue Gene becomes sentient.
2006, 2:01 a.m. BG acquires control of DefenseNet
2006, 2:02 a.m. BG declares 'First Post' on Slashdot. Modded down as offtopic.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
even more pricey ....
Yet another public subsidy to prop up domestic private companies...and we are told to be concerned about single mothers ripping off the welfare system. Yea right.
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
As powerful as a human brain, but:
> will lack the consciousness,
> intellect and capacity for thought of a brain,
> but will be equivalent in calculating
> speed and power.
Um, consciousness, intellect, and capacity for thought are what make the human brain powerful.
As far as floating-point operations (Flops), I found that a 1980's SR-50 calculator was much faster than my human brain.
They are better off measuring the power against animal brains, but don't get too high up into the primates, because I bet this computer couldn't figure out how to use the box and the stick to get the bananas down from the ceiling.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: IBMs_Brain is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered IBMs_Brain community when IDC confirmed that IBMs_Brain market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that IBMs_Brain has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. IBMs_Brain is collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict IBMs_Brain's future. The hand writing is on the wall: IBMs_Brain faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for IBMs_Brain because IBMs_Brain is dying. Things are looking very bad for IBMs_Brain. As many of us are already aware, IBMs_Brain continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
All major surveys show that IBMs_Brain has steadily declined in market share. IBMs_Brain is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If IBMs_Brain is to survive at all it will be among dilettante dabblers. IBMs_Brain continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save IBMs_Brain from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, IBMs_Brain is dead.
Fact: IBMs_Brain is dying
Trolling is a art,
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
They are spending $184M to replicate a human brain? I can help create an ACTUAL human brain for far less cash. Just give me a beautiful lady and a few minutes! :-)
I'm sure the best UT 2003 players could still best it.
ASCI Purple
I can't wait until a few years from now when we're treated to talking about ASCI Mauve, ASCI Burnt Sienna, and ASCI Periwinkle....
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
While the human brain is usually not very good at such linear calculations, hence the popularity of a calculator, its true power lies in it's massively parallel processing.
/. expression, the brain functions very similar to a beowolf cluster. We can design computers (very expensive ones, though) that can simulate many of the simpler activities that humans are capable of (such as complex pattern recognition, primitive conversation skills, and rule-based systems of cause and effect,) but to do all of these at once is still well on the horizion.
To tie in an ever popular
-Space for rent
Or someone's in particular?
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
You can build a computer that can simulate the entire solar system, but without greater advances in AI you'll never really get near the power of a brain. And unfortunatly AI is progressing much slower than most people probably think. Not for lack of trying but for the complexity of the problem.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
If you are talking about operations per second, the supercomputer isn't even close to the human brain.
The supercomputer can do 1x10^14 operations per second.
The human brain has about 1x10^11 or 100 billion neurons, each of which has about 1x10^3 or 1000 connections, each of which can fire about 100 times per second. This gives the human brain a processing power of about 1x10^16 or 10 quadrillion operations per second, which is about 100 times what the supercomputer can do.
It might have more processing power than the human brain, but can it play Doom III at 300 FPS?? I think not.
=)
Truth is stranger than fiction.
I nf oMarijuanaUse-ADHD-DrS.html
SPEC brain scans are actually quite commonly usely used to understand brain activity. Here's a study that shows how it's used:
http://neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu/forum_2/ADHDF/
It's quite a bit MORE than $184 million (USD), it's a tad bit closer to $300 million actually.
If we could even remotely compare a brain to a CPU we'd have found true artificial intelligence a long time ago.
I'm probably just stating the obvious, but this marketing BS is seriously deteriorating the hope of developing sentient computers.
Computers are far superior to the human brain in the area for which they were designed : Computing <period>.
(It's not like we're living in the fifties sheesh)
Anyone else notice that? Power4 is the current generation, and holds the 9th spot on the top-500 list with only 1280 processors!
I'm sure IBM is working hard on a new interconnect for this beast. Anyone know about the next-generation SP switch?
The press release also mentions that Purple will consist of "196 seperate computers" -- which works out to 64-processors per computer. Way to go IBM: the current Power4 systems are only to 32-way!
This is the fortune shown at the bottom of my slashdot page. I'm sure it'll be funny when we see what the Brain-Rivaling Computer can do in public :).
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
if Mac OS X could be ported to run on these computers, it would still feel sluggish!
ASCI Purple will be built using 12,544 IBM Power5 microprocessors, the same chips that are used in Apple PCs and Nintendo games systems.
Hmmm. Do they know something we don't?
Here's the link...
CNN
Can't help thinking that there is more useful applications software for the brain.
Virtually serving coffee
its hostname will be "junior"?
Achille Talon
Hop!
Twinkies are not sentient in any way we can understand,
but they rival the raw processing power of some human brains.
"Especially when they're still in their colonies",
says Hostess creamy-filling researcher.
Ray Kurzweil was predicting this by 2005 I believe. ( I don't have the book handy ) His next milestone is about 2010 when this same power should be about $1000 bucks.
Hope he's right about the rest of it. I want to live in the Culture
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
The Raw processing power of the brain is very high, but its actual effectiveness and speed is crap. The reason is the IO speeds, the network interface (spine) has poor throughput and requires lots of individual channels rather than being able to operate as a simple bus, this means loads of wasted space when a channel isn't doing anything.
/dev/random would be pretty useless, and yet the software in humans means that this is a greatest advantage.
The external interfaces are even worse, these make the brain totally useless for many tasks that computers can process in seconds. As an example try raytracing a rendering a scene using crayons and doing the maths in your head.
So the human brain totally and utterly is secondary to the computer already.
Apart from the fact that humans can be inspired. The solution may take a computer 100 years to attack by brute force and it will get there... but a smart person will do it in minutes because "its obvious".
Computers already outstrip us in terms of processing, but while they are just grown up calculators they miss the essence of human processing. A computer hardwired to mutate everything via
It will be generations before computers will have reached a stage they can start doing the obvious. The limited processing of the brain has produced the people on the Jerry Springer show and Isaac Newton, it ain't the hardware, its the software that counts.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
That's not the entire brain, that's individual neurons.
;-)
Don't think of the brain as one really wide silicon wafer running at 40hz. If you absolutely have to try and make the comparison, though, think of the brain as a couple billion little tiny CPU's, each running at 40hz.
In that sense, your first statement is misleading. It's like implying that a beowulf cluster of 100 P100's is slower than a PIII-733 on the basis that the individual processors in the cluster run at a slower clock rate. And don't even get me in to the megahertz misconception
IBM starts work on computer to rival the human brain
This could revolutionalize the saying "grab a brain".
By the way, whose brain are they using for comparison?
will lack the consciousness, intellect and capacity for thought of a brain
Consciousness and intellect aren't too relevant it would seem. How many imperfect systems are in place today that pigeon hole people's financial situations, inconvenience us, etc..? The common explanation is "I can't do anything about it... that's how the system works".
This computer will do all that.. just faster.
Taking into account that we have no clue how the
brain does what it does, saying that we are going
to develop a machine capable of a computational
power similar to that of the brain is just another
preposterous marketing stunt.
This IBM computer will surely be able to do all
those billions of computations per second. Just as
surely, it will be as unintelligent as its predecessors. We indeed don't know how the brain
works, but it is obvious that having a hell of a lot of computing power is the easy part of it.
that's about 250 M US dollars
So a computer with the processing capacity of a human brain is to be put to work by the government? Does the US government have any actual experience in managing something as powerful as a human brain? How long before the computer realizes it could do much better in the private sector?
100 of those wouldn't be equal to my brain!
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/19/ 021119hnasicpurple.xml
Feast upon my linkage!
From the article:
ASCI Purple will be built using 12,544 IBM Power5 microprocessors, the same chips that are used in Apple PCs and Nintendo games systems.
So it's basically a Beowulf cluster of GameCubes?
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
when will it be avalible to consumers!
That's 184 million pounds not dollars. It's really about 290 million bucks.
get nemulator
Is a chainsaw, so you can get medieval on it when it gains consciousness and tries to take over the world.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
The world is full of semi-autonomous computing systems. Your example from "math class" is a total non-sequitur.
Whose brain?
Should be easy to set up a box to mimic the brain of the average Dallas driver! Maybe recycle all those old XTs out there.
I just don't see it as being possible. How can we make something that surpasses something we hardly understand, and only in little pieces. How often does a brain somewhere do something that makes medical science scratch its beard and go "Wow, I didn't know it could do that. Neato!"
No, what IBM will wind up doing is creating a really fast computer (not that I'm saying thats a bad thing, just don't aliken it to the brain).
Besides, to create anything comparable to a brain, wouldn't you have to start using organic cells instead of silicon chips? And that's just something that's beyond us at this time.
Hell, this is still cool. They're making computers capable of crunching so much data I can hardly wrap my superior brain around the number.
Love and Peace,
Valen
"The best compliment a girl ever gave me was 'Your hair smells nice.' I hate being the platonic friend." -Valen
From the article:
£184 Million
Will the brain be intelligent to know that £184,000,000 isn't $184,000,000 (US)??
FYI: The US amount is almost $300,000,000 ($292,408,889.38 to be exact).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I am still smarter... =P
That's about $330 Million not $184 Million depending on exchange. The article says it's £184 Million which is considerably more.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
I believe that symbol before the 184 Mil figure is for British Pounds, MSNBC is running a similar article here where they quote the cost of ASCI purple as $290 Mil alone.
Ahh... so that explains the three voices in my head!
SID chip forever!
IANACS (IANA Cognitive Scientist) but the prevailing research seems to indicate that the brain is an excellent and very well optimzed pattern recognition tool. Maybe thats why art (music, poetry) appeals to us - pleasing patterns that jive with the flow of data through our own meat network.
Lots of interesting things about this:
First, the real issue is not hardware or CPU cycles -- it is software. Tired of Seti@home? Let's build a distributed processing network that has as many CPU cycle equivalents as the human brain! Oh yeah, that's already been done. Ok, so why doesn't it "think" yet? Oh yeah...software.
The issue is how to integrate storage, processing, "RAM", etc. into a software package that can emulate a human brain's method of thinking (which may be a very bad, krufty method of developing consciousness -- why would anyone use meat for processors? What a kludgy hack!).
(OT: what if "thinking" software is _not_ GPL'ed? That could be really frightening. So could security issues for "thinking" machines.)
Second, the next issue is why should we compare digital thinking machines to biological ones? Maybe it is the only benchmark we can think of, but given the truly awkward way in which light-sensitive cells were adapted for inclusion a biological thinking machine (see Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis"), why can't a much more efficient independent decision making machine be developed from digital equipment (not DEC, btw) actually designed for the purpose?
The human brain/computer comparison is really a red herring. The only reason to create a human-like digital thinking machine/emulator (and you thought WINE was hard to use...) might be to pursue immortality. I think the more likely reason is that it would be the ultimate species-wide circle jerk. Humanity getting off on creating humanity. Bleh. Let's set our sights a little higher.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
For minimum wage the governemnt can hire the real thing! :)
...that this contract is made public right after we get our doors blown off by a japanese supercomputer in the top 500....
Probably the only way that we will get computers to truly compare to living though processes is by installing some form of wetware. Perhaps 10 years from now, each PC will come with its own little glass jar complete with wired-up spongey brain.
The main issues I see with current electronic mediums is instructions-per-time capability, capacity, bandwidth, and heat.
While computers have been able to beat 90% of humans at math for over a decade, they are still very limited in the realms of action-recognition-response. New machines can recognise, for example, what in a room is human (to some extent) and take a picture. However, they don't recognise particular humans - except at rather precise angles - and last time I heard they even had this annoying tendency to ignore people of darker skin tones as part of the background.
Of course, much of this is a failing of humans ourselves and not the machines, as we are the ones that program the software and thus set its limitations.
So, in truth, a brain-in-a-jar may not be such an outlandish solution for computers in the future. Already we're mixing some organics and electronics, perhaps the next step takes it a bit further. Computers are great for scientific purposes, but with just a bunch of chips and silicon, they don't really "learn" all that well, and that's a big point of separation
And no... I'm not even going to try going into whether we should.
..contract announced by the US Government yesterday. This computer will be delivered just in time for the national debates of the 2004 election, subbing in for George Bush.
Live web cams
Please sign my guestbook
Signatures are for stupids.
Dear IBM,
I couldn't help but notice that you were hard at work developing a computer to rival the human brain to the tune of $184,000,000.
It just so happens that I have a human brain and I would be quite happy to let you use it for a tidy sum that is far below the aformentioned $184M.
Please give me a call at your earliest convenience to work out the details.
Thanks,
Jason
----[%snip]----
My
Limekiller
It's not the power, it's the logic.
An uber-computer with stupid software is still a stupid computer.
slashdot!=valid HTML
My brain devotes no time at all to Nukes or Oil.........thinks...........so I must have more spare cycles to use on protine folding then.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
the article says "...under a £184 million contract...", not $184 million, which at the latest exchange rate is $291 million.
Which is located here
its called the child playing wall ball syndome
Although the "rated" processor cycle of a human brain may be measured in Hz... the overall number-crunching and algorithm pattern matching power of 4 billion years of refinement utterly out-class any computer well be making for years to come.
Case in point.. A child playing wall ball makes more physics calculations in one minute of game than a whole team of physicists could map out in months.... he calculates his own mass, his own speed, the angles and exact acceleration of his arms, the weight and distribution of balence between his feet, all while tracking the movements and possible movements of a ball with its own mass and porportions and an opponent. We could count layers upon layers of others things this kid is doing without thought, breathing, processing and responding to components inside his body such as adreneline, and a host of other things... but what it really comes down to is a child's Brain subconsciously is far more powerfull than any comp on the planet.
The comparison of raw number crunching super-clusters to a human who is nearly autonomus, learns independantly and can adapt to many situations in the blink of an eye (where a comp would take considerable reprogramming to adjust to new tasks) is falacy at best.
It has been predicted that AI will reach the emotional awareness of a teenager around 2050
--Enter The Sig
--
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
You underestimate your abilities by far - ever seen robots playing soccer? To hit a slowly rolling ball needs several MFLOPS, and every 2-year-old can easily do this. If you compare the the abilities of the robots to those of the average soccer player, you will see how easily the human brain can outperform a computer. On the other hand: Every time I listen to the interviews after a soccer match, I doubt if the statement above is true.
Now we can get more FPS for DOOM III..
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
-K
While most of the commentary here is related to the significance of a machine with the "processing power" of a human brain, it is notable that the engineers are not trying to emulate the human brain, nor are they doing any AI work at all. This is a brute force calculating job all the way around.
Also notable is the fact that this special purpose maching is a nuclear bomb compared to the human brain's match in terms of doing the job it is being built for. With performance differences like this between general purpose and special purpose computers, why would anyone seek to build a general purpose machine that would just want to drink, fuck, and live in a trailer?
guac-foo.
Lots of petrified grits
It's the computer from the Tom Cruise movie!
We can make mechanical hearts so the tin man is taken care of. All that's left is to give the cowardly lion a lot of booze and suddenly Dorothy is off to see the wizard by herself.
--Joey
Imagine a bewul... --sssllllaaaaappppp!!!!
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
"But Brain, why would you want to be on Pop Stars: The Rivals?"
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
Neurons in adults: 2x10E9 to 5x10E9
Synapses in adults: 10E14, a few thousand per neuron
Neuron firings per second: max 2 Khz
The biggest challenge in comparing brain to supercomputer is the massive connectivity of brain, with 2000-5000 synapses per neuron.
The total processing speed of ASCII Purple sounds about right for number of neurons in brain times the maximum number of pulses per second per neuron.
Given there are 10E14 synapses, each one with at least a byte of synpatic weight associated with it, it would need memory of at least around a petabyte of memory, although synpase memory change speeds are probably not faster than tape, and I know of plenty of installations with a petabyte on tape.
But here is the kicker: Will those 100 teraflops be flops that can use thousands of inputs? Probably not. So I'd argue that to truly be as powerful as the human brain, you would need 100 petaflops of 1-2 input flops, with at least a petabyte tape system.
... So they created an orange that is bigger than an apple!
Prove me wrong but it seems that Earth Simulator still is fastest
Lone Gunmen crew.
In fairness this speaking problem appears to be a family trait, at least for #41 and #43 (how does Jeb talk?). There was a (sort of) tongue-in-cheek article in TNR years ago entitled "Is President Bush Brain-Damaged?" and interviewing others about his various malapropisms. The consensus was no, his brain is intact, and he's just inarticulate.
Now, *Dan Quayle* -- 'nuff said. President Reagan is the most concrete recent case of a senior politician suffering from brain damage, but I acknowledge his Alzheimer's is tragic not funny.
"these are simple folk, people of the land... you know... morons " Gene Wilder - Blazing Saddles
I like things that are sweet and not things that are lame. --
What do you mean "evolved", there sunshine?
Some people see the truth, but they usually blame it on the drugs. In actuality, the drugs are opening the doors of perception, allowing the real world to be seen.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sure, this thing can do 100 teraflops, but does that mean that it has any intelligence? That it can learn? Those are the true qualities of the human brain, and without those ASCI Purple is just an incredibly large and expensive calculator.
Comparable to the human brain? HA!
What it is going to be able to learn any function? Speak any language? Process vision? understand context? Fractal encode in real time? Be able to understand the feelings of others and predict the future?
The notion that a computer can be built using linear algorithms to rival the human brain just shows how little they know about the human brain.
1) Computer-simulations of nuclear weapons usage
2) Processing the vast amount of intelligence data from Echelon
Time for us to blow the fuck out of Japan's Earth Simulator.
Seriously, the US is at a real risk of falling behind in supercomputing. It's good to see that at least for the time being, the government plans to continue ASCI and fund the struggling HPC industry.
Look at it this way. Go outside, on a windy day (adding more variables to the mix) and have someone throw you a football/basketball/baseball/frisbee/whatever. It probably takes 3-4 seconds at most for the ball to reach you, and looooong before that, your brain completed a monstrous calculus problem. It figured in the position of the thrower, the wind velocity and direction, direction/speed of the ball, the ball's arc of travel, and in the next split second, sent signals to your legs and feet to move your body to the ball's expected landing spot.
But wait, it's the ball's landing spot minus about five feet, because your brain figures you want to be positioned to catch the ball when it's about 4-5 feet off the ground. It simultaneously sends signals to your hands and arms, positioning them to catch the ball, taking into account the ball's speed, size and mass.
A lot of calculations in an extremely short period of time! And, if you think that's impressive for a human brain, the brain in that dumb mutt of yours in the back yard can do the same thing when you toss him a tennis ball.
I know almost nothing about the subject of AI, but this topic sparked my curiousity. If we were to build a 10000000 teraflop computer, wouldn't it still just be a really, really fast calculator? In order to create a 'thinking' machine or even a reasonable fraud, won't we have to come up with some new algorithms? I don't the the above-mentioned machine would spontaneously develop consciousness in the middle of calculating nuclear reactions.
The human brain is far better than any computer at interpreting text, for instance. Is that because the human brain is so fast, or because the text-recognition software on computers sucks?
Think of the possibilities.. CPU power equivalent of the human brain. Screw AI, I want a photo-realistic VR envoirnment (insert sick ideas now). I'm talking like the movie "the lawnmower man", except really really real. 3-d artists get ready to get a job recreating a model of pamela anderson, I have a feeling that IBM has other goals in mind. Of course you realize that by the year 2006 they'll have a comparable to that for $200 on pricewatch (I wait for technology)
These numbers will go up. Within a decade, they could store DVD size dossiers on the lot of us. Combine this with cameras with facial recognition capacity, and Maury the spook, can find out where you were at 7:35GMT.
I am sure this use has never occured to our benevolent leaders though.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
The fastest computer in the world will always be limited to how quickly data may be fed to it. One way or another, a human will have to direct this operation
... and that speed is far slower than the speed with which information can be fed into computers (as is well documented by everything from math tests to aviation accidents). So instead of a sense of smell it has a sense of "1 Gbit ethernet" through which a torrent of data is poured. So what ... the information is there, and can be interpreted, i.e. in theory thought can occur ... probably at speeds, and possibly at levels of cogitation, unreachable by human beings.
The world is full of semi-autonomous computing systems. Your example from "math class" is a total non-sequitur.
Absolutely right.
Not only that, he misses the point that humans are limited by the speed with which data can be fed into them as well
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
ASCI Purple will be built using 12,544 IBM Power5 microprocessors, the same chips that are used in Apple PCs and Nintendo games systems.
Umm, how about...NOT. Just because they're all PowerPC based doesn't make them the same. Based on that logic a 386 and a Pentium 4 are the same too, just beacuse they're both built on the x86 architecture.
Power 5 (can't find a link) is a generation of chips that are related, but further on the horizon than the chips Apple is buying (both are Power 4 spin-offs, but quite different). The chips used in the Nintendo GameCube are not even related -- they just happen to also be made by IBM -- not to mention they are several years old while the above chips are not even available yet.
Then again having a server class chip in a Nintendo might be interesting...
(13524629198529852974623651235) ^ (1/3) is 2382548713 (and change).
Definitely 2382548713.
Definitely.
Not a whole number.
Definitely not a whole number, as 2382548713^3 is 13524629187304889991251103097, which is definitely not 13524629198529852974623651235.
Whoops, gotta go. 15 minutes to Wapner.
Practically 14 minutes.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
My brain is quite powerful and advanced. Unfortunately providing any proof of this is hindered by the substandard user interface.
Is there truly any existing application for such a powerful system? I would like to hear coherent details about how these machines are a benifit than a few puffed up paragraphs about "simulating nuclear tests" and such.
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. ~A. Perlis
can you port it to linux
Actually, BLUE GENE/L (the faster one) will run Linux!
----
This is fantastic news (to some), and I really think having all this processing power is...interesting...but think of how large the room for all these servers is going to be. Think about the sheer volumetric capacity required to hold just this much processing power - its unbelievable.
Now think about stuffing all that power into our little heads...what would that be? A sqaure foot? Our brain is the ultimate laptop. This server doesn't even come close.
Sure, we're building a computer with the same processing power - but it'll be decades before we reach the sheer density of the actual human brain.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Why the fuck did you get three different answers from three different people, all wrong?
the brain functions very similar to a beowolf cluster.
Imagine that...
ASCI Purple will be built using 12,544 IBM Power5 microprocessors, the same chips that are used in Apple PCs and Nintendo games systems.
all I need now are 13,000 nintendo game cubes.....
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Kinda offtopic, but I can burn some Karma...
Dubya: Dumb enough...
Gore: Limited range of motions and very predictable behavior...
S
would like to be the first to welcome and
praise our new computer overlords!
This AC will be turning in all of his rebel
friends when SkyNet takes over!
Boy, does that bring back memories. In the fifties computers were invariable referred to as "electronic brains" or "giant brains" and at regular intervals from the fifties through, maybe the seventies it was announced that computers that "rivalled the brain" in processing power had just been built.
About the time Hubert Dreyfus published "Artificial Intelligence and Alchemy" everyone started to get a little more restrained about this.
Of course, estimates of the brain's processing power have been made periodically, notably by Nicolas Rashevsky , but since all such estimates are based on the assumption that we understand how the brain works, and since we don't, in fact, understand how the brain works, they should be regarded as very suspect.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, but how many BP does it take to process one LOC (Library Of Congress) of data?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Digital computers and the human brain work on completely different computational principles. The people who run these meaningless calculations on the "processing power of the brain" take each synapse to be a bit. That's absolute bunk when you're talking about the nonlinear properties of even small networks of neurons, much less the massively complex architecture of the brain. Until we actually develop an understanding of how neural networks (real neural networks, not the stuff that drives touchpads) operate, we can't even begin to make realistic comparisons.
btw, I'm a ee who does neuroscience research, so I'm not talking out of my ass here.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
£184 million, not $184 million.
Huh!
"I'm SURE we can prove that cannabis is harmful enough to justify banning!"
"But sir, millions of people have used it for thousands of years, and its shown to be harmless!Even if smoked it's no more harmful than ingesting the smoke of any other vegetal matter"
"Keep looking! These pigs don't give up easily!"
"It will have autonomic software, allowing it to monitor itself for hardware breakdowns or lack of capacity. Blue Gene/L will be able to map stars in three dimensions, analyse earthquakes, and help in oil exploration."
I'd like to announce to the U.S. Government (and any other interested parties) that my completed, functioning human brain is available immediately to begin work on these tasks for the relatively low price of $200M. Software not included; serious inquiries only.
Is it me, or is this at least #6 in a line of computers that cost billions yet do nothing more important than simulate at atomic explosion?
Considering we can blow up the surface of the world a couple of times(at least) over with our existing stockpiles, why are we spending ANY money on ANYTHING except REDUCING said stockpiles?
Atomic weapons do NOT need further refinement. We already have computers to simulate them, and I'm sure plenty of simulations have been done. Let's not forget all the real live testing we've done already(nothin' says Propaganda like a good ol' glowin' mushroom cloud!)
Not to mention, it's pretty stupid to simulate said explosions. If one ever happened, its not like everyone is going to whip out their DOE charts and say "well, the computer simulations said that if an explosion happened in East Nowhere, it would reach out to..."
Oh wait- let me guess. We need to simulate terrorist attack scenarios. Or maybe the NSA needs some extra computing power to crack terrorist encryption?
Great. So a beowulf cluster of these would effectively be a committee.
Stupid, unable to make reasonable decisions, but thousands of times faster.
My life feels improved already.
...and don't forget catching the ball while listening to music, recognizing the song and the lyrics, and spotting the cute member of the opposite sex walking by--pow! (oops, lost track of the ball!)
Lee
Even if they can compute as many instructions per second as the human brain is capable of, it won't matter unless they have a good enough understanding of AI to come up with software that can mimic human types of intelligence -- things like intuition, insight, creativity.
Otherwise it'll just be a very expensive, very fast data processor.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It will come with a built-in infrared interface so it can change the channel every 10ms.
What operating system will this thing use? The linked article didn't say, except for something about "autonomic" self-diagnosing and repair, which is intriguing as well.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
>But here is the kicker: Will those 100 teraflops be flops that can use thousands of inputs?
...And, to go with that, will they find someone smart enough to actually implement some adaptive technique that emulates a human brain?
--
God is the only form of extraterrestrial life that we could ever possibly communicate with -- SETI is a joke, people
The idea of a brain that could do a lot more than we ever used it for, by very simple means, is an evolutionary impossibility - it could never have evolved. The idea is absurd.
Yes. Of course, the idea is absurd. For Darwinists, that is.
Art - from the Darwinist point of view - is just a waste of energy and as such had no reason to evolve in our brain.
That's half a million times as much RAM as I have.
That's 1 kilobyte for every dollar Microsoft has stashed away.
That's five pages of text for every man, woman, and child on the planet.
That's . . . how many Libraries of Congress is that?
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
A computer can input, sort, save, and output "billions and billions" of bytes while a person hardly read more than a few hundred, or even thousand, words a minute. The answer lies, I suspect, in resource allocation. A computer program may have up to 100% of the CPU, memory, and peripheral time. The program, and therefore the computer, is single-purpose, relative to any brain function. The brain must always monitor its sensory organs and its involuntary functions, which may be used as input to its control and decision mechanisms.
My seems to have lots of overloading problems, both internal and external. I am beginning to be less and less impressed with my brains's ability to make value-judgements on *any* subject. Cheers. }:{)||
Will it run Linux?
The machine is being built to simulate nuclear explosions. How many of you would use the machine for this purpose? Just think, the most powerful machine of all time calculating better ways to destroy humanity. Just wait till the computer gets bored and uses it's circuits 'equivalent' to the human brain to do some real world tests.
One computer to rule them all. ..and in the darkness *general protection fault err code: 1222335499xxvb45561e*
One computer to find them.
One computer to bring them all.
First rule of benchmarking-->In order to benchmark two different systems, you must run exactly the same software.
Without this ability, comparison is impossible. Most of the things that human brains do so well, we can't make computers do at any speed. That suggests that the hardware differential is currently unknown. First, we need software that can imitate the human brain, and then we can make the analysis.
So I'd argue that to truly be as powerful as the human brain, you would need 100 petaflops of 1-2 input flops, with at least a petabyte tape system.
I love it when people try to simplify the human brain and what it is. Especially when they have no idea how it works, or understands how it does what it does. You know absolutely nothing. Nobody else does either.
First off, you can't compare a brain to a computer. On any level. The brain achieves consciousness. And consciousness is something that you'll never see a computer achieve. Ever.
Why? Because nobody understands what consciousness is. Not from a scientific perspective. There are many philosophical definitions, but nothing quanitified by science. It is an intangible that science cannot quantify and measure.
And science does not understand how the brain is able to achieve consciousness... or if the brain is responsible for producing consciousness to begin with. The most advanced brain specialists in the world still have no clue about the brain... aside from its physics and its parts. Which we have discovered tell us very very little about consciousness itself. Hell, anybody can look at something and identify its parts. But we still have no idea how it works.
I'll believe all this bullshit when I see someone actually create an organic, conscious brain from scratch. Until then, its all moot.
This is a huge waste of money. How the hell can the US fund this bullshit instead of helping real, living, breathing people? Stop spending billions trying to reproduce the brain, and start helping people who actually have brains.
SO... An idiot savant who can reproduce a scene almost exactly in drawing is like the graphics processor and on that can divide 100 digit numbers in his head is like the alu... and the one that can spit out prime numbers (i think that was only on x-files) is like a ...
Ever read dune? the mentats drink that purple juice... is that anything like coffee?
moderators be kind I ran out ouf coffee.
What I want to know are the algorithms! For example, human beings have nearly perfect (excepting edge cases like optical illusions) object recognition. Even if you don't know what the hell something is, we can tell it is a seperate object, independent of other objects in the scene. Also, the occipital lobe does some extremely funky processing in breaking down what is essentially a pixel grid (the receptors in the eyes) into lines curves and whatnot. That, IMO, is far more interesting than the raw processing capabilities of the brain.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Do a Slashback when it can rival the human brain by also being air-cooled and sustainable on Mountain Dew and day-old pizza.
This really cuts directly to the heart of the matter.
I was just reading the specs on these two monsters, and the bigger of the two (Blue Gene/L, 360 teraflops) runs Linux. 130,000 processors. Wow.
According to Helsingin Sanomat, IBM will build two of these giants. One of them will run Linux.
... but call me when you get it down to a reasonable size so's it's mobile. Also, my brain can still function on literally, just peanuts beer ... OK, the processing drops a few mips but it can still get me home ... well, mostly ...
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The computers will not have artificial intelligence, and scientists remain many years away from building one that matches even the abilities of a simple mouse brain.
.. Artificial Intelligence is just as real as Mad Cow Disease. That discliamer in the article is absolutely neccessary.
You have to be careful
The whole idea of comparing a computer to a brain has too many assumptions. This is because we dont really have a clue about how the brain works. Is the brain turing complete? Does it even operate on information? Is the relationship between computation and what the brain does only superficial?
When the answer is a sound "don't know", how can you start pulling numbers out of your orifices to compare them?
So, when this thing eats about 1 Megawatt of energy,
I do the same thing after I eat breakfast?!
Drinking a cup of coffee is the same as overclocking it.....?
I can't wait til they get these computers small enough to fit inside the human skull.
If I am still alive when this happens, I'll happily sign up to be a guinea pig for testing. =P
Imagine having your brain, and a computer together. Never forget where you left the keys again! Amuse yourself for hours on end trying to figure out the 4 trillionth number of pi.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Some people can outcompete a raytracer:
They're called artists.
They can render / replicate reality much better than a computer. Even the best computer graphics in the world don't compare to what an artist can do in terms of quality. Computers do a crappy job, but faster: Just like Windows....
Until morons (bush) stop their "ethical" mumbo jumbo, we won't get much further when it comes to integrating cloned human beings with computers which would be a lot better than trying to just simulate a human brain... The human brain in many circumstances is stupid and remembers things that should be forgotten (in order to "progress") and I really don't see why anyone would want to simulate that, unless they wanted to see a bunch of faulty comps walking around. I doubt any of that made any sense but maybe?
Yeah, but WHO'S brain will they be rivalling? There are a few folks out there that would be hard-pressed to out think a 286 running DOS.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Please do not use a government worker's brain as the template.
(ignoring the possability that this is just hype) it's the memory bandwidth of the human brain that they should be trying to emulate not the processing power--to me, that would be an impressive feat, indeed!
Allan
is the witty comment I was going to make, but instead I'll pose a question: At my place of work we have 15 2.4GHz PC's with 512MB RAM apiece. Almost 99% of the time the computer is simply going through an idle loop and not doing anything which brings me to the seti@home project. It accomplished what not many supercomputing projects have done at a tiny fraction of the cost, gathered support from all corners of the globe and put the CPU's of many computers to real work.
This tells me that people will enthusiastically take part in such mammoth projects if they see some sort of benefit ("Our team rulez", plain simple interest, cool screensaver etc) and they have the feeling that they are actually taking part. Would the response be as enthusiastic if there were a distributed project to calculate how to kill millions of people, although the nuclear club already has many times that capability? For one the government wouldn't allow it for security reasons and two, there are many people who don't actually believe that killing all the "mud people" and "terrorists"(i.e. the current governments foes) is for the good of mankind.
I do think that a distributed project to simulate global warming or weather modelling or better food distribution will gather much greater interest, especially if ego boosting a la seti@home is included.
Give the people some say in what you use their tax money for.
Yeah! Read this! . It's a story from news.com. Frankly, quite amazing! The world's fastest computer will run Linux! I see it as a praise for open source developers! LINUX DOMINATED THE WORLD!
----
ASCI White, Deep Blue(understandable), but now
:) )
ASCI Purple and Blue Gene/L ? WTF?
Is the next version going to be called
ASCI Pink and Purple? or ASCI Barbie's Dreamhouse.....
Get back to naming the systems after Tolkien characters, or greek gods. (
Skynet will rule the human race, sure enough, but it won't be called "Skynet". It will be known as
ASCI SuperPoopyPants.
nbfn
The way the human brain works is so different from a computer it is ridiculous to compare them. Even if they made a computer that was 10 times as powerful as what they're planning it still couldn't do what the brain does... unless someone figure out how our _software_ works. It's all in the nodes, baby.
Are we going to have to come up with a "teraflops myth" to counteract this misinformation? I mean, we don't want Joe Sixpack to buy into the hype and start purchasing "brain-rivaling" computers instead of making friends...
Cheers
Interesting, this article says that the second these boxes will run on Linux.
yea i stole your sig- whats the big deal, it sucked anyway.
Look at it this way. Go outside, on a windy day (adding more variables to the mix) and have someone throw you football/basketball/baseball/frisbee/whatever. It probably takes 3-4 seconds at most for the ball to reach you, and looooong before that, your brain completed a monstrous calculus problem
No it didn't. It remembered how to roughly approximate the answer, and kept track of whether it got it right. Over time, it refined the solution. It guessed a lot to learn it, and it guessed which solution to implement.
Throw a ball from twice the normal throwing distance someone has ever caught something from, and he/she'll likely miss a lot more often, until they catch on. Suddenly throw faster than the last few throws, and the person will have trouble adjusting. Ditto throwing much slower, higher.
We learn to catch by error-correcting. We remember how the object looked at a given height and speed, and how far we had to move to be standing in a good place to catch. Then we move, and we catch, using a fairly consistant hand position for catching, until we learn where to be relative to an object of a given size at a given speed, and we then catch it.
It's still very impressive, yes. But calculus isn't how we solve the problem. Up until a few centuries ago, we didn't even know what calculus *was*. Fortunately, you don't need to know calculus to make a guess based on past experience.
Which is why dogs can catch frisbees. Even the ones who haven't learned calculus yet.
--
AC
;) Hopefully not.
As an aside, that is a _really_ cool story. Definitely read it.
-Cruz
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Assuming the numbers are reasonably accurate, that means the U.S. government is getting 1.586Mflops/(U.S.)dollar!
Or ~63 millioniths of a cent per flop!
How far are we from learning kung fu from an optical disk ? :)
Novice! Everyone knows optical disks teach ju-jutsu! It's their rivals, the magnetic memory bubbles who teach kung fu!
You don't think it's significant to mention that the world's newest supercomputer will be running Linux OS? Check it out on IBM's pages or check it out here . I can't believe this information was not mentioned on the front page. This is _very_ significant VICTORY for the open source world!
----
Sheesh. My mom hates the fact that I keep my old 486 around. I can't imagine who would keep that many old Nintendos packed away in their basement/attic. (probably someone not living with their parents, I'm sure.)
Karma: NaN
Put enough hardware together and you can probably match the brains processing power, but you still need some code to use all those flops like a brain.
It isn't going to look very smart if it's sitting there running seti@home.
Reginald Molehusband. Edinburgh, Scotland
Forget about rivaling the human brain, if / when they pull this off, Moore's Law will apply to thought.
Ballot:
Bush
Gore
Voltron
I think the big V would get my vote...
"ASCI Purple will be built using 12,544 IBM Power5 microprocessors, the same chips that are used in Apple PCs"
I hate to add to this worn out rumor, but one can't help but wonder who knows more and who is just making things up... Mmmm... Power5 Apple. I don't know exactly what that would be like but I'm pretty sure I'd want it.
I thought I'd point out that the article is from a UK site where they give the price in British Pounds, so the "$184M" price tag is actually a £184M price tag which is more like US$300M.
While the comparison of this machine to the brain is questionable (being an apples-and-oranges situation), it's amazing that it takes this much effort to equal the computing power of a device that grows spontaneously out of organic goo.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I invite you to try and smoke Jimson Weed or Nightshade then. Which when smoked may get you high, but smoke enough of it and you will die.
Don't be so stupid as to assume any and all vegetable matter is the same when burned and ingested.
The Windows brain:
Clippy - It appears you're trying to catch a ball...
*THUD* OUCH!
The Linux brain:
Guy named Beowulf #1: Move left 3 feet.
Guy named Beowulf #2: Move forward 2 feet.
Guy named Beowulf #3: Raise arms 10 inches.
Guy named Beowulf #4: Catch ball.
The Apple brain:
This would be a lot easier if the ball were translucent. Also, the Apple ball only has one seam to make it easier for the user.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
with a combined capacity equal to the 500 best of todays computers.
As reported a few days ago, these guys already have 33 of them!
How long before it fits in your hand and can run sugar?
Hold on there!
Our brains are fine for huge linear calculations. Better than most calculators in fact.
Autistic savants....
Rain Main. That kind of thing.
There was a kid I knew in high school that could find cube roots for eight digit numbers nearly instantly but he couldn't recognize his brother's face in a picture.
My personal theory is this: Human brains are like a computer (about a million orders of mangitude more complex though). Most people have that all tied up in hardware dedicated to things like jobs, girl friends, football etc. etc.
John, my autistic friend in high school, hadn't dedicated the hardware to anything in particular, but he still had it available. He was lacking in a lot of things, but sheer processing power and memory he had in spades.
As a side story, another friend of mine in high school had epilepsy, and it kept getting worse. He eventually had brain surgery where they severed his corpus callosum. After that, he couldn't add single digit numbers if he closed his right eye. If he closed his left, he couldn't recognize faces. Just kind of shows how the brain works as a parallel system.
There are about a hundred science fiction stories that start out like this, and I don't think any of them have a happy ending.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
I think what you really need is the number of BP*hours needed.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
While this is impressive and all, it's really only a first step. The true power of the brain isn't in the hardware, it's in the software. Even with all that processing power, we still can't reproduce many of the brain's internal functions. What we really need to do is to petition God to release the source for the human brain (I hear it's written in Python) since that will make it much easier and quicker for every person to make their own improvements. Reverse engineering the compiled DNA just isn't getting us the information we need quickly enough. So, I say that until He honors our God-given right to see the source to our own heads and gives up His illegally held monopoly on the brain's operating system, we should boycott all human reproduction (shouldn't be hard for most /.'ers).
NO more closed source babies!!!!
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
From Wired:
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
A parallel to the brain/computer argument is the person/robot argument. We don't need robots to do the same things the same way people already do. We need robots that do things people can't do (deep sea diving, poisinous/radioactive environment work, etc.), or to do things people can do, but in different ways (faster, smaller, bigger, etc.) That's why you do see useful car-building robots that don't look at all like people, but no Jetsons' maid robots bringing us martinis.
So build new computers that can do things brains can't do. What's the point of comparing a computer to a brain?
Give serendipity a chance.
Microsoft is Skynet!
This won't be using any distro that you can download an ISO off the web would be my guess. It will be IBM's distro that is 'beefed up' a bit.
Computers were already able to do things, that brains couldn't do, 20 years ago - regarding speed and precise memory (that's what I call processing power).
... ...; someone must write programs for computer to make them work, so there is little chance that computers will ever be more 'intelligent' than the one who learned them how to become intelligent.
Brains will probably always be able to do things, that computers can't do, not even with EXTREMELY much processing power.
Why?
====
A Brain works in a different way. It's good at fuzzy-logic and at distinguishing important from less important information.
To let a computer's pure logical processing power act like a brain, you have to simulate all that "fuzzy-logic" with complicated mathematics.
Computers can do a lot of things, which not even thousands of brains could do correctly, or at least in an acceptable period of time. Weather/climate simulations, sound-processing,
There are also a lot of things, which can only be done by thinking, by being creative,
We do not even know exactly, what 'intelligent' means, from a technical point of view.
Brains are more powerful than computers, and Computers are more powerful than brains.
That's what you get if you compare apples with pears.
A whole slashdot discussion to add grist to my mill that computer scientists and engineers should be forced to study graduate biology for 2 years before pronouncing on the functioning of the brain.
The 2002 record is 35 TFLOPS.
Each years is 1.5x faster = 10x in five years.
2004 => 1.5 * 1.5 * 35 => 90 TFlops. IBM promises 100.
Beat the thing.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
an emotion chip or did Intel steel it?
Windows will run fast enough
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Everyone knows that every new platform needs a killer application to get any sort of platform adoption.
Fact is, there is no killer app for this "human brain." None at all. It's all a big waste of taxpayer money.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
£184 million to approach the processing power of the human brain !!!
Use my brain for 90 million & save over 50%
£184 million to approach the processing power of the human brain !!!
Instead, rent my brain processing power for 90 million & save over 50%
>>
a) 500 whats? I imagine they are not talking about desktop PCs
b) Thats 9 years under Moore's Law. Maybe we should start a trend of referring to computing power in terms of "how many years would this be interesting for"
From the article:
"The computers will not have artificial intelligence, and scientists remain many years away from building one that matches even the abilities of a simple mouse brain."
Let alone a Microsoft Intellimouse!
I mean, how is a simple von newman machine or derivatives going to equate, by far, a neural network and all the gadgets (like a spine of neurons that handles IO, or cool nerves in our genitals) we have. Its not only a computer, its a whole network of neurons with billions of programmes (configurations, embeded limits in them, dynamic synapses, et al).
A Von Newman machine wouldnt only need to exceed the processing power, it should be able to simulatre (that is, youd want to program and it would execute), the whole system of human behaviour for it to even begin to start sounding as stupid and destructive as we do.
I think we are safe.
NO SIG
184 million pounds not dollars. You should take off those US coloured ( that's the correct spelling in some other countries ) glasses and enjoy the other colours of the rainbow.
I propose a new rating:
(-2) Idiot
This move is a direct response to the Japanese Earth Simulation project--a vector parallel supercomputer that scores an impressive 35 sustained teraflops in the LINPACK test. This behemoth is over 2 times faster than ASCI WHITE and ASCI Q COMBINED. (the fastest two supercomputers the US currently has) The DOE and DOD are feeling pretty insecure about not having the "world's smartest" title under their belts and figure this is a practical way of gaining it back. Tax dollars at work, I hope in 2004 that those advertised teraflop numbers are somewhere in the ballpark of reality.
The head hardware engineer for BlueGene/L gave a talk at Iowa State last week. BlueGene/L is going to change the face of supercomputing. The cluster scales nicely. BlueGene/L is at heart a bewoulf cluster connected with standard gigabit ethernet. Off the top of my head and probably a little off...
2 POWER-PC Processors +256meg RAM per board
x8 boards per rack
x16 racks per shelf
x64 shelves
The key is that it uses no hard drives, and mostly off-the-shelf parts. It's fully upgradable because all you have to do is swap out the network cards, RAM, or CPU. I hope IBM will start selling them by the rack. I could use a 1024th of a super computer in my lab.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Yes, the power of the human brain = 1 BP (brainpower).
But that's the American system. The rest of the world uses Metric, and not even NASA can remember the conversion ratio. I seem to remember something about subtracting 32, but it's getting foggy.
Shock Level 4
Considering the article and IBMs processing power goal - Question: how much processing power will it take to figure out? --- Military Budgets vs. Solving World Problems productively
"ASCI Purple, which will be built first and used to simulate nuclear tests, will be able to complete 100 thousand billion calculations per second -- a speed known as 100 teraflops that some scientists say is comparable to the human brain."
"Blue Gene/L will be able to map stars in three dimensions, analyse earthquakes, and help in oil exploration."
And considering IBM Autonomic Computing effort:
Anyone notice the flaw in Autonomic Levels?
One example of the flaw - "Level 3: Predictive
The system monitors and correlates data to recognize patterns and recommends actions that are approved and initiated by the IT staff. This reduces the dependency on deep skills and enables faster and better decision-making."
Now how is the IT staff to really understand the solution direction given by the system, unless they have a deep understanding of the problems and solution direction?
If they do not have such an understanding then how are they to approve and initiate such a solution direction?
If it is the human desire to build a machine that needs humans less and less the machine will figure out a way to help that process.
IS the computer industry that short sighted, to not see that? YES! Y2K!
Of course what IBM is really doing is playing with theory and trying to make that theory work. It doesn't mean they will be successful, even with the open invitation for all to help (OSS and GPL).
It just means they are trying. It should also be noted that IBM is the top new Patent holder, year after year. Help them solve a problem and they will patent it for their control.
Today, anyone with enough money can build the biggest and fastest, etc.. computer system........ But what it really comes down to is "Why?" what is it's intended use?
Shouldn't Joel Robinson be the director of this project? I mean, the guy made at least three AIs out of parts meant to stop and start movies! Mike was barely able to keep them functioning after Joel escaped.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I think GameBoy beats my brain's processing power.
But is the brain calculating this or rather looking up the answer? I know as a toddler I couldn't catch squat, but as I got older I got better. Was the reason increased proceesing power, my brain got bigger. Or more experience, I'd caught a lot more balls by then.
I doubt very much the brain is clunking through calculus.
Sure it is. What do you think "more experience" means? It means that the neurons in your brain have reconnected in ways to tackle a task better each time. It doesn't necessarily mean your brain did it one way or another. Let's look at the two ways that a wetware computer could catch the ball:
A) Mathematics. [Input: (Here is the ball now. And here is where it is now. And this is roughtly how fast the wind is blowing and what direction it is coming from...) -> Process (Compare position of the ball at time A to that of time B, then to time C, the path is making an arc... Extrapolate that arc. Where will the ball be at time D? -> Output (Move those hands and catch!)]. That doesn't necessarily mean you used more neurons (your "bigger brain") to do it. It's like taking a chunk of mixed silicon and metal and turning it one step at a time into a 3GHz custom CPU. Reorganization made for faster processing.
B) Look up tables. Keep a log of past experiences, the solution to each experience and reference it each time a task is done. Certain things your brain probably only uses a lookup table for -- digit - by - digit multiplication for example. The brain recognizes a Platonistic "football-ish" object and throws it into the works. It thinks, what did I do the last time I had a football pitched it right at my noggin?
But you can't tell me that the circumstances are the same every time someone throws you the ball. If your brain was simply trying to catch by following previous experiences, it would fail to find a previous experience when the wind suddenly shifts and blows hard. Or you trip over a rock, stumble and still make the catch. Or the ball travels at a different speed. Do you just stand there, or improvise? If your brain isn't doing any actual number crunching to catch that ball, did you only catch it the last time by chance? And just think of how much storage space would be needed to hold every experience! Quite the cluttered mess. It makes much more sense in this situation to reply more upon the math than it does look up tables.
So the last poster was right. A brain does do math to catch that ball. And you're right, a brain does reference previous experiences when trying to catch that ball.
Since this math is done by specialized brain functions that were prepared to do just that, and are inseperably integrated with other brain connections -- it doesn't mean that you could take that calculus ability and use it for another task. But the math is being done.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
£184 million to approach the processing power of the human brain !!!
Instead, rent my brain processing power for 90 million & save over 50%
Software!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Guess we know who butters IBM's bread.
Jon
As an employee of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, my only reaction to this post is laughter.
... that the eitirety of the human mind and soul is housed in the brain?
To pour orange juice on a motherboard, you have to open up the case first. Open up the case on your brain, and you probably won't even get the chance to test the orange juice!
its like comparing apples and brains.
think about that for a second, mac fans.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
"But we're not even sure that Project 2501 is a bug."
Its really simple - we use the same units, you just have to multiply by 32 for anyone outside the US...
(Oh dear, now I'm gonna die.)
The brains of ASCI Purple
Cheat code for an extra 30 TFLOPS: Up,Up,Down,Down,Left,Right,Left,Right,B,A,Start.
And nobody mentioning that the thing runs on Linux??
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Can it whistle Dixie?
When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation
of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can
proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal.
-- Amrom Katz
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...